Threats never stand still, and exploits kits were no exception. 2015 saw multiple changes to this part of the threat landscape: freshly-discovered exploits were added, and compromised websites and malvertising were used to deploy and spread threats using exploit kits. Exploit kits were a key part of the threat landscape in 2015. In this series of posts,…

Breaches do not just die. 2015’s biggest cases showed us that data breaches do not end with their respective public disclosures. Just because the causes of compromise have been spotted and acknowledged does not mean the damage is done. Data was stolen. Networks were infiltrated and monitored. That kind of information, in the wrong hands, could be disastrous for any organization seeking to protect their customers and prevent any form of monetary loss or legal repercussion. Ashley Madison and the Hacking Team learned this the hard way when attackers and cybercriminals were able to utilize their data in further attacks.

A “new” and important vulnerability has been discovered that affects HTTPS and other services that rely on SSL/TLS implementations. This flaw is in the SSLv2 protocol, and affects all implementations. Researchers refer to this attack as DROWN – short for “Decrypting RSA using Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption”. This attack allows attackers to read or steal information sent via the “secure” connection. No attacks in the wild are currently known.

Earlier this week, the maintainers of the GNU C Library (known as glibc, an open-source software library widely used in Linux systems) announced that they had released a fix for a vulnerability introduced in 2008 that allowed a buffer overflow to take place. This could be used by an attacker to run malicious code on a Linux system.

When experts call on people to brace for disaster, it’s always based on signs that point to impending events. This quarter, we saw numerous signposts pointing to hazards to sensitive data that could lead to damages to individuals’ personal lives and organizations’ operations. The high-profile breaches, vulnerability exploits, and other attacks we saw this past…